What’s A2 Hosting? Amazon Web Hosting Review
You’ve likely never heard of A2 Hosting. Neither had I initially. That’s a shame. Because while they are less’web famous’ since BlueHost or HostGator, they claim to boast speeds of up to 20X faster. They have been around since 2001, previously known as Iniquinet (yes — good call about the rebranding!) . A2 Hosting has information centers around the world in the US (Michigan), Europe (Amsterdam) and Asia (Singapore). Additionally, they make claims of’99.9% uptime’ and’ace assistance’. (OK, now it’s simply sounding too good to be true.) So what is the verdict? Is it a blazing fast host with excellent uptime and amazing support? Or a different firm who’s great with adjectives, but can not back it up with performance? Amazon Web Hosting Review
Pros of using A2 Hosting
A2 hosting claims their speeds and customer service are amazing. Just how good are they actually? It ends up — pretty excellent! Here are the reasonswhy:
Best Shared Hosting Provider We’ve Tested…
A2 has promised speeds up to 20x quicker than their competitors, remember? Anything close to that would be impressive. And rewarding. Some of the best online brands load in under a second because taking even 3 minutes to load can cause you dropping 50 percent your visitors. A2 hosting page loading times came with an average of 351ms over a period of ten months which is 50+ percent faster than the market average (890ms).
How can they get it?
A2 Hosting is taking additional precautions to restrict the number of people on’shared’ hosting servers and executing additional performance like caching which stores information in people’s browsers (thereby limiting the amount of times they have to go back and request advice out of your website repeatedly and over again).
Click Here to sign up to your A2 Hosting Service
Quick & Efficient Customer Care
Fast load times are nice. But none of that matters if your encounter — the help you do (or do not ) receive when difficulties pop up — stems out lackluster. A2 Hosting follows their string of amazing functionality with friendly, useful, US-based support. They are available 24/7/365 through email, chat, telephone or ticket submission.
It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, given their A+ rating with the BBB (that is impressive considering they have been doing so for 15+ years ). We tried reaching out with their service to present a fair, unbiased inspection and have been connected instantly. Their support representative was also incredibly responsive, answering our questions within a moment. Amazon Web Hosting Review
Free’HackScan’ Keeps Your Website Safe
A2 provides a couple of useful, preventative steps to keep hackers out of your website using HackScan; a completely free service including
double hosting anti virus, virus scanning, 24/7 security monitoring, along with a brute force defense. Some hosts only provide comparable tools to use if you’re so inclined. But unless you know what you’re doing, they are useless. A2 hosting goes over and beyond providing this service for you, providing you with’peace of mind’ so you can just worry about running the website (and NOT consistently performing technical maintenance).
Free Website Migrations
A2 can allow you to relocate another hosting provider — gratis! — in case your website now uses cPanel (which most professional websites do). Moving the site yourself could be a massive hassle (if you’re not the most tech-savvy) or some time consuming, menial task (in case you have a huge site with several pages, images, etc.).
Compatible with Frequent Content Management Systems (CMS)
Installing popular content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, OpenCart, and Magento is a straightforward,’1-click’ installation. Pretty simple and painless. In fact, your A2
accounts will come with the A2 Optimized WordPress plugin pre-installed should you opt for the Turbo package.
Money Back Guarantee — 30 Days
A2 Hosting stands for their merchandise, offering a full refund if you don’t like your experience for any reason (within 30 days). Please note that domain registrations, setup fees, SSL certificate, along with other migration charges are not refundable (that is fairly common with other companies as well).
Free Content Delivery Network
Along with complimentary virus scanning, you will also be able to use Cloudflare’s Content Delivery Network (CDN). Cloudflare will route traffic to your site to choose the course of least resistance. It follows you’ll get even quicker website speeds, enhanced security (Cloudflare CDN will prevent malicious threats), straightforward setup, increased bandwidth, and much more. The very best part? It is all totally free.
Green Web Hosting
A2 Hosting affirms the environment, which means you can feel good about picking them as a hosting company. Since 2007, the business has partnered with Carbonfund.org to combat climate change. If caring for the environment is something that you’re passionate about, you can save the entire world just by having an A2 hosting account.
All their servers are”carbon neutral” since they purchase carbon offsets. When you purchase carbon offsets, you are funding projects that decrease the emission of greenhouse gases. These kinds of projects are responsible for restoring forests, increasing the energy efficiency of buildings or transportation, or upgrading power plants to create less pollution.
For every amount of energy A2 Hosting uses, they are buying carbon offsets to make the world a greener, cleaner place. Along with fighting climate change, the company also enables employees to telecommute to stop unnecessary CO2 emissions.
They also recycle older servers instead of throwing out old components, plant trees during specific promotions, and reduce garbage by
utilizing coffee mugs instead of disposable coffee cups. The company was also one of the first suppliers that offered Solid State Disk Drives (SSDs). These drives utilize much less energy than traditional HDDs. Amazon Web Hosting Review
Disadvantages of utilizing A2 Hosting
Our affection to A2 hosting should be obvious by now. Wonderful speed, and help go a very long way in our novels. In addition, they don’t nickel-and-dime you to get smaller things such as migrations. Unfortunately, nobody’s perfect. Listed below are a few of A2’s defects:
Uptime Has Slipped to 99.91% During the Last 10 Months
‘Uptime’ is crucial, since the opposite — downtime — may cost you a lot of money! That is why when somebody (or some host) informs you they have 100% uptime, you shouldn’t feel the hype. While 100% may be attainable, it is VERY rare
More Costly than Average
The adage,”You get what you pay for,” rings true here. These fancy advantages come at a price. A2 hosting will be pricier than the typical web host (coming from around the middle of the pack). As with other online hoststhey also employ a frequent process of providing the lowest possible cost if you register for a longer duration. Traditionally their cheapest shared hosting plan advertised at $3.92 intended you needed to register for 36 months.
Limits on Cheapest Plan
If you want the flamboyant features, you need to cough up some more dough. As an instance, their Lite program (the cheapest one) has limitations on the amount of sites (1, as opposed to unlimited) or databases (5, rather than infinite ) you receive. However, it’s well worth noting that in our experience, the cheapest plan is still much, much quicker than the majority of other internet hosts. So you are probably still OK.
If you want turbo fast speeds, you are going to need to register for the turbo plan. The
Turbo and Swift programs are alike, however the Turbo server is full-stacked with additional perks. For instance, the Turbo server includes PHP API. APC is empowered with the Turbo plan, and the host comes with a built-in caching engine. Because of this, the rates are lightning fast!
APC is allowed by default, and reports get 256 MB of APC memory. It’s essential to be aware that in the event that you would like to change how PHP is configured to the Turbo Server, you will need to use the cPanel instead of the php.ini documents. The Turbo program simplifies .htaccess files to increase speeds, too. Turbo web hosting servers do not support Ruby-based or Python-based web applications. Including Rails and Django.
Click Here to register to your A2 Hosting Service
A2 Hosting Setup, Hosting Plans & Quick Facts
Shared Hosting: They have three main shared hosting plans:
Lite program: This program begins at $3.92 per month. It supports 1 domain , 5 subdomains, 5 databases along with 25 email account.
Swift plan: This plan starts at $4.90 a month. It supports unlimited domains, databases and email accounts.
Turbo program: This plan starts at $9.31 each month. It supports unlimited domain names, databases and email accounts. Additionally, it will come with HTTP/2 and SPDY support for improved website speed.
Ease of Signup: Three step sign up. Not too tricky.
Payment Methods: Credit Card, PayPal, Check or Money Order, Bank Transfer, Skrill and PayULatam.
Hidden Charges and Clauses: Payments made by check are not refundable. But honestly, who pays with check anymore?! There’s also a $25 fee to move your accounts to another data centre or to downgrade your hosting plan.
Upsells: Very few upsells.
Account Activation: Immediate Activation.
Control Panel and Dashboard Experience: cPanel.
Setup of Apps and CMSs (WordPress, Joomla, etc.): Choice to install WordPress and other favorite CMSs are available at checkout.
Can We Recommend A2 Hosting?
Yes. Undoubtedly. Other web hosts may have the large, flashy marketing campaigns. Or the entire blogosphere singing their praises. But A2 hosting delivers where it matters a lot: functionality. Despite flying under the radar for all these years, they provide some of the best speed results we have seen. Their customer support can be friendly, attentive and could not be recommended more highly. Need a quick, reliable, and useful hosting company for just about any kind of web site? Give A2 Hosting a try. You shouldn’t be disappointed. Amazon Web Hosting Review
Click Here to register for your A2 Hosting Service